Art Show!

Sorry to have been neglecting the blog again, this has been the most hectic month! First of all, my boyfriend and I got engaged! Yay! So I should say, my fiance... And then my fiance graduated from medical school 3 days later, YAY again! And family came, then we went on a crazy vacation. We were supposed to spend two weeks in Croatia. One week with his mom and sister and some friends, then a week just the two of us. Relaxing, unwinding, etc. Well the weather forecast for Croatia was nothing but rain for the whole time, so we decided to drive down to Greece where it would be sunny and hot. What an adventure driving through the Balkans. Then we came back to Krakow where all our friends were packing and leaving, then we went to Edinburgh to look for an apartment for ourselves, since that is where Fiance will be starting residency. Just got back last night. Whew! I have been working on some art and I honestly can't wait to have all of it done, as I'm pretty excited about all of it. I'm still working on that flower watercolor but I had to put it aside to work on the two other commissions. 

Anyway, I just realized I titled this post "Art Show" and haven't mentioned anything about an art show yet. So a co-worker of mine from NJ contacted me and said her theater company puts up kind of a gallery in June/July and said my artwork, florals in particular, were really fitting with what they were looking for and asked if I would like to be part of it. Sure! But since I am in Krakow, I had to call my mom and ask her to 1) Locate my artwork I wanted to enter (I knew exactly where it was, but still had to talk her through it) 2) Find out where I could do inexpensive framing, 3) Have my  mom take it to the framer and then pick it up when done and 4) Arrange my friend to pick up the work for me. So through a team effort, my work got framed and hung! It is for sale, so if I got a sale that would be so exciting! This is the artwork I entered:

So that's all for now, hopefully soon I can post a new painting! 

Sketching

So I've been trying to work more from life than from photographs when I can, it's good practice.  When I have fresh flowers, I always think, "I have to do something with these before they start to wilt!", but that rarely ever happens. But lately I have been drawing some of my flowers after they've started wilting and it's kind of fun, and makes an interesting sketch. This was a yellow gerbera daisy, one of my favorite kinds of flowers. (Ok I have a lot of favorite kinds of flowers, I just really love all of them!) I sketched it in pencil as it sat in an old blue wine bottle I use as a vase.

This next one I did last week, I had been given a potted flower plant for my birthday and it had started to die. (It's even more dead now, no matter that I keep it watered and sitting in the window. Potted plants just always die on me *sniff*). I used colored pencil on this one.

This plant was very funny, because the night my friend gave it to me, we were at a restaurant to celebrate my birthday. When she handed it to me, all three flowers were just buds. But every time I would look at it, one of the buds seemed to be opening up really fast. By the time we left, maybe 2 hours later, that one bud was fully open and I was afraid it was almost going to die, start wilting right there. Of the other 2 buds, one was open a bit and the last was still a bud. I've never seen a flower bloom so quickly! I wanted to draw this because I loved the way the leaves were all twisting and turning and curving around each other and I loved the gorgeous bright spring green they were. The flowers petals were also fun to sketch. :)